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Our View: Perfect Brookswood OCP a phantom

There was no possible plan that could have made everyone happy.
9096455_web1_LangArt_opinion

The new Brookswood official community plan will not satisfy everyone in the community.

But there isn’t a plan in existence that would make everyone, or even a majority of residents, completely happy.

We can say that the new OCP is better than nothing, and it’s better than the plan that was defeated in 2014.

Density was cut back slightly, and a tree protection bylaw is built in.

Developers and landowners now have more certainty about rules and regulations.

There were residents who wanted no condos, or no small lots, or no development at all.

That last idea was never going to happen.

In fact, the best argument for finalizing the new OCP is that the developers weren’t just at the doorstep. They were already in Brookswood, building madly.

Development was never banned in south Brookswood and Fernridge. It was just curtailed by the fact that landowners were hoping for higher densities in the new plan.

But after so many delays, they gave up. With house prices sky-high, they started carving up lots into 7,000-square-foot parcels. The OCP will at least give form to the growth that is coming.

Brookswood won’t stay the same. Not all the changes will be positive. Ask anyone who remembers Walnut Grove in the 1970s, or Willoughby in the 1990s, and you’ll hear nostalgia for the acreages and quiet roads. But what’s grown up there are real communities, too. And the new Fernridge will have the same chance to become a community, just as Brookswood did.

– M.C.